Bob Brodie, Co-founder and CTO, SUMO Heavy:

News of IBM acquiring Red Hat for $33 billion was one of the biggest surprises of the year but the move makes sense. The acquisition gives IBM access to an even larger open source market than they previously had. In 2019, I predict more enterprises will move toward Kubernetes and Docker to deploy and manage containerized applications. On a broader level, machine learning will become more widely used across both SMBs and enterprises, and blockchain and distributed applications will still not saturate the market.

Amazon Prime subscribers, who pay $119, £79 or AU$59 annually for perks such as free shipping and access to music, movies and TV shows, purchased more than 2 billion items on the site with one-day or faster delivery, the internet retailer said Sunday. And the most popular item on the speedy Amazon Prime Now service – was bananas.

Mobile payment volume on Black Friday was up 42 percent over Black Friday 2017, the company said, and it even outpaced the mobile payment volume on Cyber Monday this year.

Kohl’s, Nordstrom, Walmart and Macy’s were the big online sales winners on Cyber Monday among 10 major retailers, all posting revenue jumps compared to Cyber Monday in 2017. Walmart’s Jet.com and Sears, however, both saw online revenue decline compared with last year, according to an Edison Trends report emailed to Retail Dive.

Toys and hobbies retailers collectively grew their online sales 21.5% in 2017—the fourth-fastest rate among the 15 product categories tracked by Internet Retailer.

In the recent 2018 Internet Retailer KPIs & Site Search Survey, 103 e-commerce companies were asked how their organization’s search functions impact their key performance indicators (KPIs).

Thanks to the successful “Kurisumasu ni wa kentakkii!” (Kentucky for Christmas!) marketing campaign in 1974, Japan can’t get enough KFC on Christmas Day.